The Morality of Grave Robbing

The second excerpt of The Knife Man by Wendy Moore focuses on John Hunter's darker days as a Resurrection Man. His elder brother William gave him the task of acquiring bodies for his medical practices and he demanded them to be fresh.

The first way Hunter began getting bodies was waiting at the gallows to barter with the friends and family of the deceased. It was always a somewhat barbaric thing with surgeons and apprentices clamoring to the hanging corpses while the families of the deceased tried to protect them from the atrocities of 17th century dissection. There was much public outrage about the practices of anatomy because of religious beliefs and also because those being hanged weren't always dead and would awaken on the dissection table. Other ways of obtaining bodies was through grave robbing and making deals with grave workers pre-burial.

Personally, I am torn on the morality of the idea of grave robbing. Of course I can see how family and friends of the deceased would be very upset at the idea of their loved one being dug up and cut up but without these foundations to early anatomical science we, as a population, wouldn't know as much as we do now. To me it seems like a necessary evil because it forwarded us as a people and paved the way for modern medical science. Are there any other ways we could have gone about learning about the human body without numerous dissections of both healthy and diseased individuals?

Megan Alvarez